Depends heavily on the jurisdiction, I am afraid. This exact case was used as a precedent where I'm from (Czech Republic) that no, merely downloading over BitTorrent still constitutes "sharing copyrighted material".
Presumably that was because BitTorrent sends data even before receiving 100% of it? But I assume that downloading these files would not be allowed in this case anyway as per Zákon č. 121/2000 Sb. §29 (2) since this is not a published work.
